Essential .NET, Volume 1: The Common Language Runtime

Explicit Method Invocation

The previous discussion looked at how virtual methods introduce a level of indirection between the call site and the actual method that is executed. This level of indirection is largely transparent to the caller, with the CLR using the concrete type of the target object to automatically determine which method to use. In addition to virtual methods, the CLR provides facilities to make method invocation even more flexible, to the point where one can discover and invoke arbitrary methods without a priori knowledge of their signature or even their name. This facility—explicit method invocation—is critical for building highly dynamic systems.

Recall that one makes CLR metadata accessible through System.Type and friends. ...